Yesterday our house was robbed by a man who came up and knocked on the door, offering to help with some gardening. He began the job he had pretended he wanted to do,  removing the weeds from the front and then I had to go out to an appointment and when I came back, we had been robbed. This left me with an aching question: why did I agree to hire someone who I knew from the beginning I didn’t like, who the kids thought was sketchy? Some missplaced pity of his story of being out of work moved me to answer the door and agree to let him have the job of cleaning up the front flower bed.

When I got back to the “crime scene,” my home, the back door was ajar, and my computer and a guitar and a mandolin were gone, along with two computer screens.  Drawers all over the house were open where he had looked for cash. He took the kids allowance money they had left on their dressers. As I walked through a little before noon and surveyed the damage, I wondered: was it something I did or failed to do that caused this violation?

I know this is far from the greatest injustic ever seen in Fort Worth. I realize this happens every day. But nevertheless, I had to wonder as I surveyed the mess, what was the purpose of this in the cosmic scheme? Why would someone hurt another, unprovoked? Would he ever be caught? Punished? What gave him the idea of doing such a deed?

What did such a person feel that justified, in the criminal mind, doing something like this? Resentment, that great negative emotion, must be the true motvation for such acts and many greater wrongs. Larceny of any type is somehow tied up with an infantile cry of “mine.” The idea that we had something that others did not is the justification for theft. No complaint on my part that we have little enough would make sense to some people. We have enough to make us a target.

I have turned this over in my head all day: bad things happen. What can we do except call the bank and delink the computer from the account, order new deadbolts, give the kids a lecture about never answering the door when strange people knock, swear never to give anyone without a reference from someone I know the time of day ever again,

I am not Job. But I do feel afflicted, when my computer with all my stories and letters and pictures of three years of children is gone. What can this theif have known of how much these materials meant to me? Unless the computer is miraculously recovered the value of the items will be destroyed forever, because no one but my family understands them. The computer, meanwhile, 4 or 5 years old, could hardly be worth $50. And the mandolin the thief carried off, which my husband played to the children, what price that loss?

The only answer I can find is the answer God gave to Job, which is, it is not man’s path to know the answer.